The airline industry may be in a tailspin, but you can find people in the business who still care about their customers. Delta Air Lines’ Lee Macenczak is one of those people.
Macenczak, the airline’s chief of customer service, is known to personally respond to letters from Delta passengers and to look beyond policies to actually make things right with customers.
Take the example of Pentti Grant and Lynda Edris, who missed a connecting flight to Santo Domingo because of weather.
Delta rebooked the couple on the next American Airlines flight (which it didn’t have to). “Here is where our trouble starts,” remembers Edris. “We arrived in Santo Domingo — our luggage did not.”
American said Delta had the luggage and Delta said that American had the luggage. We told both Airlines the flight numbers that we had taken. Delta kept giving us a number to call in Santo Domingo and no one ever answered the phone.
Delta told us the hours they were open and we called before this time, during this time and after this time. It didn’t matter, no one answered. We ran up a $94 phone bill trying to find our luggage.
Edris and her husband also ran up a $52 bill for toiletries and a change of clothes.
Eventually, they recovered their luggage. But what about the bill for calling and clothes? Who should cover that?
I suggested she write a brief, polite letter to the carrier, explaining what happened. She sent an e-mail directly to Macenczak, outlining her grievance.
We are not upset with Delta for losing our luggage, and we thank you for putting us on an American Airlines flight. But we are very upset with Delta for giving us wrong information about who to call in Santo Domingo. We told them every time that we called this number that no one answered and they just kept giving us the same number.
Due to lack of communication within your system, we feel that refunding us the amount of money we had to spend while trying to find our luggage would show good faith and a good company policy.
A short while later, Delta responded by refunding both expenses “no questions asked.”
Nice work.
